


A Surprising Development

by SylvanWitch



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Kidnapping, M/M, Moriarty lives!, Reluctant Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-09-25 19:26:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17127317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: It was such an extraordinary feeling that for long moments, he couldn’t identify what the quickening of his breath might mean, and then when it came to him, he was set even further aback.





	A Surprising Development

**Author's Note:**

  * For [navaan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/gifts).



> For Navaan, who requested this unusual-to-me pairing: Thank you for the inspiration!

Sherlock Holmes was surprised.

 

It was such an extraordinary feeling that for long moments, he couldn’t identify what the quickening of his breath might mean, and then when it came to him, he was set even further aback.

 

The series of unlikely events that had led to this astonishing moment—

 

That he would enter a low-rent coffee shop because he’d seen a fly-specked poster pinned by one green tack to the bulletin board inside…

 

That that poster would suggest an impossibility both horrifying and—he had to admit to being far more familiar with _this_ uncomfortable feeling—exciting…

 

That he’d aid a frazzled mother with a puling child in a pram because said mother needed to exit precipitately…

 

That he’d approach the counter for a disposable cup into which to pour the mother’s coffee, which she’d intended to drink in the café but which would now have to be ‘to-go’…

 

That the barista would engage him in a lengthy and entirely illogical explanation of why they didn’t have paper anything in the place because he wanted his great-great-great grandchildren to understand what a tree was…

 

That by the time he’d gotten done schooling the boy on the myriad false causes upon which he’d founded his tottering tower of nonsense, the woman would have gone with (thank god) the child, but the pram would remain…

 

That as he was examining said pram for some sign of her reason for abandoning it, he’d hear a faint click and then a louder hiss, and before the words, “Get out, all of you!  Gassssss…” had quite left his lips, he’d be unconscious…

 

That he’d wake up zip-tied to a sturdy metal chair in an unknown location, having been stripped of his overcoat, socks and shoes, tie, watch, and every accessory he carried upon his person to use in situations just such as this one…

 

Of course, he was surprised, even, if he were being particularly honest with himself, flabbergasted.  Not by the circumstances of his capture, for it happened so often he’d grown rather blasé about that.

 

But that he’d overlooked the obvious signs of a trap—the address of the coffee shop (Bart’s Mews), the poster’s unlikely image (an acrobat stretched cruciform, face down in midair, with an Art Deco waterfall filling the space behind him), the name of the barista spelled out in spiky letters on his shirt:  _Maury_.

 

How but that he’d been consumed by that odd admixture of horror and hope, which even now was filling his veins with a fizzing lightness and turning his stomach to ice?

 

“I see you’ve figured it out, then.  I must admit to being disappointed in you, Holmes.  I had expected a little more of a challenge, not this…unfortunate…lapse in, shall we say, judgment?” 

 

The familiar voice came from behind him, and Holmes had to fight the urge to crane his head around to find the other man.

 

“Moriarty,” he answered, affecting complete disregard for the proximity, never mind the sheer, impossible existence, of his captor. “If you’d wanted to see me, you could have simply left me a message.”

 

“Oh, but I did.” 

 

And he had, Holmes realized, thinking back to the reason he’d been in the neighborhood of that coffee shop in the first place.

 

“You killed Hensdale?”

 

Holmes didn’t have a feeling about the man’s death one way or another—by all accounts he’d been a sorry waste of oxygen all around—but the spectacular nature of said death had certainly interested him—not every day you had a crucifixion, even in London—and the fact that the Met’s forensic teams had turned up no evidence at all, not even trace residue.

 

“You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.”

 

“It’s worth it to have you here with me,” Moriarty answered, close enough behind Holmes to lay the words in a warm line along Holmes’ ear and jaw.

 

Holmes clenched his teeth and tried not to shiver.  Moriarty’s self-satisfied laugh suggested that he’d failed to hide his response to Moriarty’s closeness.

 

Adopting the bored tone he often used to bait Mycroft (who knew better) and Watson (who was an easy target), Sherlock asked: “So are you going to kill me now, or will there be torture of some sort first?” 

 

“Kill you?” Moriarty purred from directly behind him, close enough now that Holmes thought he could feel the other man’s heat at his nape.  This time, he didn’t bother to hide the shiver.  (He couldn’t be blamed; the floor was cold and his feet were bare.)

 

Holmes tried not to start when he felt warm hands touching his own, tried not to bolt from the chair and put some distance between them when he realized that Moriarty had freed his hands.

 

The cuffs clinked against the metal legs of the chair as Moriarty chuckled in his ear.  “Do you think that’s why I brought you here?”

 

Holmes swallowed and said nothing; he was deep in his mind, tearing down one hallway full of closed doors after another; nothing was opening to him, nothing becoming apparent.

 

Hands, warm and real, squeezed his shoulders and brought him back into the room.

 

“Would I have gone to all this trouble—left you an especially tricksy puzzle to solve—if I’d intended to kill you at the end of it?”  Moriarty sounded almost—what, hurt?  Not likely.

 

“Given the last time you lured me someplace with death on your mind, I’m to be forgiven for drawing conclusions.”

 

Moriarty tsked.  “You really are off your game, Holmes.  Drawing conclusions without first considering all available evidence…  You’ve changed.  You’re…”

 

He felt the press of Moriarty’s body against the back of the chair, an increase of the pressure of the hands on his shoulders as Moriarty leaned over him and whispered, “Afraid.”

 

Holmes calculated the likely outcomes of myriad responses before settling on the unlikeliest one:  the truth.

 

“Yes,” and his voice came out thin, reedy, hardly recognizable as his own.

 

“Mmm,” Moriarty agreed.  “Heartrate elevated, breathing erratic”—Moriarty leaned around the side of the chair to take in a sliver of Holmes’ face—“pupils dilated.  Tell me, Holmes, to what would you attribute these physiological changes?”

 

Holmes wanted to say fear, but he knew that was only partly true.  His mouth was dry, his palms damp—he found it all highly distasteful.

 

Except for the parts that he didn’t, such as the heat of the man at his back, the weight of his hands on his shoulders, holding but not pressing. 

 

His voice, when it came, bringing with it a liquid heat in Holmes’ belly.

 

For all that the act of sex had never particularly interested him, Holmes was not ignorant of the signs of sexual arousal.  He knew that the heaviness in his belly and the heat flushing his cheeks signaled his interest as clearly as if he’d answered Moriarty’s question aloud.

 

Even so, the heat of Moriarty’s hand when he placed it against the side of Holmes’ neck almost startled a sound out of him; only a will of iron kept him sitting in the chair, allowed him to accept that simple, intimate touch.

 

“You don’t entirely dislike this,” Moriarty observed, curling his fingers so that they just brushed the fragile apple of Holmes’ throat. 

 

“I don’t entirely like it, either,” Holmes observed, and Moriarty removed his hand.

 

“My apologies.  I misunderstood your reaction,” but his tone suggested that they both knew Moriarty had not misunderstood anything.

 

“Would you prefer to see me face to face, I wonder,” Moriarty mused, moving to suit action to words.

 

“Don’t,” Holmes commanded, and it was his own voice again, low and strong.

 

Moriarty laughed.  “So that’s how you’d like to play it, then:  Plausible deniability?  If you don’t see me, you can pretend I’m not the one making you feel this way?”  He punctuated his words by running both hands down Holmes’ chest, stopping as the tips of his fingers brushed the waistband of Holmes’ trousers.

 

Holmes’ muscles tightened, and he felt a fluttering in his throat—fear, anticipation, exhilaration.  Did he want Moriarty to continue this sick flirtation?  Did he hope the other man would open his fly, take him out, stroke him?

 

He swallowed, closing his eyes against the visceral sensation of Moriarty’s quick, clever hands on him.

 

He shook his head, as much to deny himself as to express his lack of consent.

 

Moriarty once again took his touch away, and Holmes found himself wanting it back.  He told himself it was because Moriarty was a worthy opponent, because he’d been bored since Moriarty’s death, manic with the need to find something to replace the consuming excitement of pursuing one of Moriarty’s labyrinthine plots.

 

He knew it was more than that:  His cock was half-hard, his blood drumming in his ears, his breathing quick, and he was just a little dizzy, a swooping, vertiginous sensation that he’d last experienced while in the thrall of heroin.

 

“Say the word,” Moriarty murmured, intimate, caressing, “And I’ll leave you alone.”

 

Again, Holmes closed his eyes.  He swallowed around something enormous blocking his throat and told himself it was only thirst.

 

“I…cannot,” he managed at last, though the words sounded as though they had been strangled from him.

 

Moriarty said nothing for a suspended moment when Holmes couldn’t even hear him breathing for the blood in his own ears.

 

Then, in a perfectly ordinary voice, Moriarty said, “Pity.”

 

There was the sound of receding footsteps, the creak of a door opening on disused hinges and then closing with a muffled thud, and then silence, as though Moriarty were waiting just beyond the closed door for Holmes to change his mind.

 

To prevent just that treacherous thing, Holmes wrapped his hands around the edges of the chair seat, feeling the cold metal sear his palms.  He pressed his feet against the cold floor, welcoming the bracing chill rushing to his bladder to distract him from the heat low in his belly that wanted him to get up, open the door, and pursue the strange conflict of body and mind that Moriarty had begun in him.

 

At last, the thunder in his ears signaling that he’d been holding his breath, Holmes let it out in a rush and stood, feeling stiff and worn out, with a gas-induced headache and a lingering sense of unreality. 

 

He walked to the door, found it unlocked (as he’d known he would), ascended a few rough flagstone stairs, and emerged in the sad remains of a kitchen garden behind an attached brownstone in what could be any of a dozen London neighborhoods.

 

He lingered a moment in the cold, damp winter air, coatless, shoeless, and shivering, welcoming his body’s preoccupation with its immediate survival to drive away the last of his uneasy desires.

 

He may have managed to wall away the strange effect Moriarty had had on him except for the way his heart skipped a beat when he remembered that his nemesis was alive and that Holmes would surely cross paths with him again, a fact that should not make him smile, yet there it was, a lip-stretching grimace, reluctant on his cold-stiffened cheeks.

 

That grin grew more natural as he took in the sight of his cellphone perched precariously on one listing post of the garden’s back gate.

 

When he pressed the home button, the screen lit up—unlocked, naturally—on an unknown number saved to his contacts and the icon that indicated he had an unread text message.

 

He resisted the urge to scan the blank faces of the buildings around him, knowing with a certainty that bordered uncomfortably on instinct that his nemesis was watching to see his reaction.

 

Wanting to reassert some measure of the old control, Holmes pocketed the phone without reading the text, and if a frisson of anticipation was once again electrifying his skin, quickening his breath and his heartrate, well…Holmes couldn’t say he was surprised.


End file.
